Food Aid Providers and Their Responses to Food Insecurity: A Spatial Perspective

At a time of widening economic inequalities and distributive injustices, such as the right to food not being met, this research adopts a spatial perspective to examine how food aid providers address place poverty. We use Castilhos and Dolbec’s (2018) typology of spaces to advance understandings of collaborative food aid partnerships and their spatial engagement when seeking to alleviate urban food insecurity. Through an interpretivist approach including 10 in-depth interviews with food aid organisations, we determine that food aid providers are established through a variety of organisational structures and operational practices involving collaborative arrangements with third sector and other public-private sector organisations. Often flexible and responsive to demand for emergency food provision, these food aid providers help to reconfigure spaces of concentrated poverty while achieving positive social impact. This research contributes to existing literature on charitable food provision by broadening Castilhos and Dolbec’s (2018) theorisation. It does so by conceptualising transitional space, an additional type of space through which transitions between spaces of food insecurity are experienced. We illuminate non-linear, porous movements from segregating spaces (i.e., emergency food provision spaces) to transitional spaces of food aid provision (i.e., food pantries via food aid membership). This concept allows for a fuller depiction of the temporal spatiality of cities associated with concentrated poverty and deprivation. We conclude by providing future opportunities for research and relevant insights for food aid organisations, such as the need to consider the strategic alignment of existing or potential collaborative partnerships with poverty reduction goals.